Mark Nepo has been interviewed by Oprah on her Soul Series radio network and his The Book of the Awakening has been featured in O, The Oprah magazine and on the Oprah TV show. In this book, Mark invites readers to explore their own inner core through the stories of ordinary people, political activists, artists, spiritual teachers from a variety of traditions. These are people who have faced themselves, their warts and weaknesses. They have stood by the courage of their convictions in all kinds of moments, great and small. Nepo's insights and commentary are spot on, and help readers relate the stories of others to their own lives. The book is divided into three sections--finding our inner core, standing by our inner core, and sustaining the practice of living from that place. Each of the nearly 60 brief essays and stories elucidates and inspires. Nepo's broad range of stories and people, of traditions and insights, offers myriad ways for readers to relate to their own search for courage. The late Howard Zinn said of this book, "A poetic, profoundly thoughtful rumination on how we might live." *This book was originally published by Conari Press in 2007 under the title Facing the Lion, Being the Lion.

Excerpt:

Facing Ourselves
Consciously or unconsciously, we avoid facing things as they are in themselves and so we want God to open a door for us which is beyond . . . (But) to find life’s purpose we must go through the door of ourselves.
Ù Krishnamurti

Why face ourselves? Because the self is the only opening through which we can know the stuff of life and how it makes up the world. Being human, experience clogs up the sacred opening of self. Without facing ourselves, the self remains filmed over and small and very little gets through, and even that essential trickle stops touching us. It is only through the rinsed-out self that we can experience compassion and truth. For sure, love and suffering can rinse out the self. But these, too, can be siphoned through our walls. What saves us from ourselves is the power of our own honest gaze, which remains a cleansing agent that can wash out whatever thickens within us and wash off whatever grows over us. As a cleansing agent, self-reflection is indispensable to staying fully alive. We wouldn’t think of going more than a few days without washing and showering. So think of facing ourselves as spiritual hygiene. For the clogged up self is the petty self, the one who ventures into the world and only finds “me.” But the cleansed self is the transparent self, the one who feels the aliveness and pain in everything. This is the self that serves as an inlet to the world, always feeling what moves through.

This is all hard enough, and yet we often narrow our inlet and cover our openings. We do this every time we strap on a mask or persona. We do this every time we fashion a facsimile of ourselves and wear it as a splash guard against the unexpected. With this in mind, it seems the antidote to saving face is putting face down. Ultimately, this involves removing our masks, no matter how uncanny the likeness or how good the fit. For masks clog us up and film us over, too. Of course, we think we need masks for protection. But one lesson I keep learning in my time on earth is that often the thing we mask, because we fear it won’t survive if left out in the open, has the strength we need to move through life. The irony is that the strength we hide is like a match—it needs to strike off something in the open to ignite.

It took many attempts, but when I put aside the stories others had written for me, I finally removed my mask, and there was my skin wanting for light. When suffering removed my skin, there was the muscle and bone that had carried me through time. When time removed the muscle and bone, there was the river of life that had kept me alive. When the river of life stilled itself, I could see through to the bottom of everything, waiting to be stirred. This took many lifetimes. To my surprise, the only way to cut through in this lifetime is to love and be loved. For love is the only thing that cuts the work of time in half. And facing ourselves is the surest way to ready ourselves for love.

As with many things that matter, though, there is work to be engaged before the work. In order to face ourselves, we must face life. In order to face life, we must face death. In his compelling and mysterious apprenticeship with the sorcerer Don Juan, Carlos Castenada is told that death is an advisor: that it sits over our left shoulder, insuring the uniqueness of every thing we behold. Now we can become transfixed with the fact that every living thing will die, or we can become enlivened by the fact that every thing we face is utterly unrepeatable. This is no small threshold to cross each day. But when we can enter the realm of utter uniqueness, that fact alone demands that we bring our best and truest self to each thing we face. This is the mysterious doorway to meaning, and the price of admission is nothing less than our fullest nature, opened by the practice of facing ourselves. In beautiful symmetry, what is found on the inside of all that is unrepeatable is the lifeblood of the true self.

Despite the countless distractions and obstacles we face each day, life is a journey of approaching a horizon that we never arrive at. The journey is sometimes made alone, sometimes with others. But the approach, over a lifetime, if faced openly and honestly, hones us into an instrument of living that turns suffering into a music that is bewitching and healing, a music we call love. And, if blessed to endure the distractions and move through the obstacles, we discover a curious law of inner alchemy: the closer we get to light, the more fully we are lighted. The closer we get to truth and beauty, the more truthful and beautiful we become. In the same way, the closer we get to that sacred meadow called death, the more and more alive we grow. And the more we live in the sanctity that life and death reveal in each other, the more loving we grow.

If any of this makes sense to you, you might be asking, how? How do we face ourselves? It is an elusive art at best, and I do not pretend to have expertise—just a lifetime of failed attempts, which, oddly, have their own beauty when left in the light. But one thing is clear: the self, faced cleanly, opens many things. It is the one place we have left to try when all other paths fail. As the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges says, “Any life, no matter how long and complex it may be, is made up of a single moment—the moment in which a person finds out, once and for all, who they are.”

The Life of the Lion
How I w-w-wish I had some c-c-courage . . .
Ù the Lion in The Wizard of Oz

En route to facing ourselves, we encounter a ravine we must cross, much like the ravine in which Jacob wrestles with the unnamed angel in order to go on. It is here that we establish our relationship to strength and power, qualities that can help us enjoin the living or destroy ourselves and everything we touch. Throughout history, this wrestling with strength and power has been characterized in the mythology of the lion.

Nearly all cultures have stories of the lion which represent the best and worst of what it means to be human. From the Egyptian sphinx that guards the sun to the fire-breathing Chimera of Greece that burns everything it breathes on, from the Chinese lion that chases evil spirits to the horrendous and impenetrable Nemean lion that Hercules slew, from the sea lions of northern Canada who nurse those lost at sea to the role of Buddha as the tamer of lions in men (Purusa-damya-sarathi), the lion has inspired us to our courage and vigilance and warned us against our brutality and greed.

Most stories throughout the ages lift up the lion, or the lion-like, as either the one who embodies and liberates or the one who consumes and turns brutal. Often, there is a strength and power that faces the brutal and a misuse of that strength and power that can turn brutal. In essence, there is always the lion energy fulfilled (the lionhearted) and the shadow of that energy run amok (the king of the jungle).This is not just an idea, but an important dynamic of reality that we each need to understand as we enter our days. For both energies live in each of us, and we can respond with either in an instant to whatever situation is before us.

Indeed, the life of the lion has been a story throughout time of our relationship to strength and power, which enlarges when we are connected and sharpens when we are cut off. When we can find our core and stand by it, a connective, embodied power arises that unifies the living. Such embodiments can be heroic in the deepest sense. Yet when we grow lost or numb and are cut off from that core, the power grips and consumes us. It uses us up in the endless extension and replication of itself at all cost. Such is the sanctity of being centered and the eyeless authority of having no center. The connective power embodies and serves the Whole, while the consuming power grips and serves the part. And we are often left in the middle, being pulled by both.

In truth, the journeys of facing the lion and being the lion are inescapable, part of an archetypal passage that everyone must go through, whether we arrive in life as a leader of armies or the mother of twelve. In this regard, facing the lion and being the lion are initiations by which we discover and tend our place in the Universe. When facing the lion of our potential, we are called to enter a journey of individuation and discovery through which we can find our core. Not surprisingly, at the center, our core and the Source reveal their Oneness. The strength realized from touching on that Oneness is the strength of the lion mani•fest in the world.

At the same time,we are called to face the unleashed power of the lion run amok. In this regard, facing the lion often involves standing up to things and people who, in not standing by their core, have become agents that dishearten all they touch. In these moments, they become voracious, life-draining shadows of the lion. And we are charged to stand by our core in order not be trodden by this energy. It is a function of universal balance that calls us to face the lion turned brutal.

More deeply, facing the lion is the call to summon our best qualities in order to face some one, some thing, some force that is challenging. But this one or thing or force is not always bad or dangerous, as life often demands that we face things in order to transform—a process we often resist. If persistent, facing our challenges can transform us into our truest self. So to face does not mean to resist or defeat, but to encounter honestly. And to be does not mean to retreat from the world, but to merge with it from a centered place of strength.

Now an immediate paradox presents itself as soon as we attempt to both face the lion and be the lion. The paradox is: When we are the lion, do others fear facing us? Just when are we stubborn and imposing? And when are we humble instruments for another’s inevitable transformation? At our best, we serve as inadvertent triggers for each other’s eventual illumination. At our worst, we blindly oppress others and keep them from being who they are called to be. I don’t believe any of us consciously do this, though if some do, I would call their deliberate act of suppression evil. So it is not enough to simply be a lion. We have to work hard not to mistreat others with our strength once we find it.

Two contemporary myths that speak to all of this are the popular epics, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. Both unfold ancient themes about strength, power, and courage. In Star Wars, the generational twining of the dark and light side of the force, as competing ways of being, harks all the way back to Cain and Abel. Instead of brothers resisting and loving each other, we have a father and son doing so. And while the force is never fully defined, it echoes the universal ground of being at the center of every spiritual tradition. It is tantamount to the Tao, the mysterious stream of life that releases its infinite power when we can align with it. The dark side implies the destructive chaos that seems to always be unleashed when we—through fear, greed, and arrogance—try to capture the infinite in a bottle for our own use. It is the intoxicated ego that often does harm by thinking it can direct and manipulate something too powerful to ever be controlled, like trying to thread a needle with lightning.

In The Lord of the Rings, however, J. R. R. Tolkien boldly creates a new story in which he says that the power itself can never be trusted, regardless of its source or our relationship to it. And so the courage for young Frodo is to destroy the ring that releases the power, so that no one can wear it and be tempted into brutality. As we look at the dark side of human history, Tolkien may prove the wisest among us.

Yet these ageless physics of being in the world may not speak to you. Still, you may ask: Why face the lion? Why be the lion? In answer, I offer the passionate insight of Martin Luther King, Jr., who revealed an inextricable link between power and love:

Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites—polar opposites—so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love.

We’ve got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our time.

So here we are and, regardless of our position in life, we each will come into contact with power. Like it or not, we can no more avoid it than the air we need to breathe. As with air, we must inhale and exhale strength and power to live. The question has always been: how do we define these elements? Is strength the art of authority, of achieving dominion over situations and others, as rulers throughout history have maintained? Or is strength the art of embrace, of surrendering to the power of love and truth rising up within us, as spiritual elders throughout history have offered? Or is the secret of power an elusive braiding of capacities we don’t understand? Regardless of our preference or insight or ignorance, we have to be in relationship to these elements. That this is so seems a koan imprinted by God into the journey of life. And so what is it we are to learn from this journey? It is a dangerous set of lessons, to be sure.

We all carry the seed of each element: the power of authority and the power of embrace. When broken or humbled, we move from one to the other. It was a German monk named Schwarz who, in 1369, devised the idea of propelling a projectile with gunpowder. And so the first handgun shot its first bullet. But what caused a contemplative to create a gun? Why did he trade inner power for outer power? And five hundred years later, Alfred Nobel signed his last will and testament in Paris. With it, he tried to compensate for unleashing dynamite on the world by creating the Nobel Prizes, including the Peace Prize, first awarded in 1901 and funded with money earned from selling dynamite. What made him want to counter the outer power he let loose on the world?

In one way, the journey can be reduced to this challenge: to either be of God—that is, to be in kinship to everything larger than us, in alignment with the Whole—or to be Godlike, as in being the creator and ruler over all that we see. The difference has defined the twin rivers of history: those who have yearned to become wholehearted and complete, in the image of God, committed to all ways of knowing, though we can never be all knowing, and those who have yearned to assume God’s position, to be a god, and conquer or possess the world. Though the challenge seldom presents itself this starkly. More often, we are tempted to trudge after geese in the snow until we have a clear shot, only to find that the trigger has frozen, and, reluctantly, we put down our gun and just listen to them flutter off, to where we secretly would like to go.